The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  “So this fellow comes into the store every Tuesday morning,” Joe Bitowf said, “and buys two hardboiled mysteries. Every Tuesday, rain or shine. That’s his reading for the week, and I have to tell you sometimes it’s hard to find something to recommend to him, because he’s been doing this for a while now.”

  Joe manages the ground-floor paperback department at the Mysterious Bookshop in midtown Manhattan. He’s been doing it for a while, too, and if he was running out of titles to suggest, that meant that his customer was running through the books faster than the publishing industry was turning out new ones.

  “He’s read everybody,” he went on. “All of your stuff, of course, and Estleman and Greenleaf and Valin and Parker. John Lutz. Joe Gores. Jeremiah Healy. And everybody else you can think of. Everybody. So he’s in here the day before yesterday at his usual time and he says, ‘This guy Raymond Chandler. Is he somebody I might be apt to like?’

  “Can you believe it? He never read Chandler. And it had never occurred to me to turn him on to Chandler, because I assumed—”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So I sent him out of here with The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. I figured he might as well start at the beginning and read them in order. And I thought to myself, Mister, you’re in for a treat.”

  A treat indeed, to read Raymond Chandler for the first time. I almost envied the man, even as I marveled at his having been able to defer gratification so long. How had he managed it?

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “Chandler’s the one they’ve all heard of, even if they haven’t read anything more hardboiled than The Bridges of Madison County. Him and Dashiell Hammett. Chandler and Hammett, Hammett and Chandler, that’s all you hear, and—”

  “My God,” he said. “I wonder if he’s read Hammett?”

  Hammett and Chandler, Chandler and Hammett. They are so often mentioned in the same breath as co-founders of a school of writing that it is easy to imagine them sharing a table in some side street dive, lighting each other’s cigarettes, killing a fifth of bourbon together. Ray and Dash, plotting a new course for American crime fiction.

  Never happened.

  They met once, in January, 1936, at a Black Mask dinner in Los Angeles. Chandler had published his first story in that magazine two years earlier, around the time of publication of The Thin Man, Hammett’s final novel. Chandler’s own first novel, The Big Sleep, wouldn’t see print until 1939. Chandler later described Hammett as “nice-looking, tall, quiet, and gray-haired, with a fearful capacity for Scotch.” As far as anyone knows, they never corresponded, never spoke again.

  But Chandler certainly read Hammett, and was quick to credit him in “The Simple Art of Murder” with giving a new direction to American mystery fiction. Hammett, he wrote, “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley . . . [he] gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse . . . . Hammett is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

  All of this, Chandler went on, was still not quite enough. And he described the essential ingredient in a passage that seems to have defined the hardboiled hero for all time: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid . . . . He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world . . . .

  “He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him . . . .

  “The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

  For all their author’s eloquence, I can’t avoid the thought that there’s something oddly self-serving about Chandler’s observations. His description of the archetypical hero is quite specifically a description of Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of all seven of his novels.

  Is it a description of Chandler as well?

  When you take a gander at his life, he doesn’t come off looking like a Mean Streets kind of guy.

  He was born in Chicago in 1888 and spent much of his early childhood in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. When he was seven his parents divorced and his Irish-born mother took him to live with her mother and sister in a London suburb. He had a traditional English public school education at Dulwich, and emerged from it scribbling poems, some two dozen of which he published in a London newspaper. At 23 he returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. He enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1917 and saw combat in France, his service ending abruptly when a German artillery barrage left him the sole survivor of his platoon.

  Back in L.A., he met Cissy—Pearl Eugenie Hurlburt Porcher Pascal—and saw her through her second divorce; four years later, and two weeks after his own mother’s death, they were married. He was 35. Cissy was 53.

  He was in the oil business by then, and he rose within the company, becoming a vice president. He drank alcoholically, chased women, and lost his job. It was 1932, he was 44 years old, and the country was in the depths of the Depression. He decided to write his way out of it.

  He looked at the slicks—Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post. While they paid lavishly for fiction, he found them superficial and fundamentally dishonest. The detective pulps, and specifically Black Mask, were far more appealing, and he read widely in the field, deliberately imitating established writers like Erle Stanley Gardner in order to teach himself how to construct a crime story. His first piece of fiction was five months in the writing; Black Mask bought it at once, and Chandler was soon a regular contributor to the magazine. By the end of the decade he had published some twenty stories, most of them in Black Mask, the rest in Dime Detective. It was no way to make a living—Black Mask’s base rate was a penny a word—but it was a good training ground. Chandler learned how to put a story together, and he found his voice as a writer. In the process, he found Philip Marlowe.

  His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Several others followed at intervals of a year or two. Then a stretch of film work interrupted the novel writing. There was a six-year gap between The Lady in the Lake (1943) and The Little Sister, and another four years before the 1953 publication of The Long Goodbye.

  Throughout these years Chandler lived in what we have learned to call Chandler country—southern California, first in Los Angeles, then in La Jolla. Although he once called L.A. “a city with all the personality of a paper cup,” his Los Angeles remains remarkably vivid, and curiously timeless. There are no drive-by shootings in Chandler’s Los Angeles, no traffic jams on the Santa Monica Freeway, no houses sliding into the ocean. But the mood hasn’t changed much. His landscapes have the look of bad early Technicolor, at once faded and garish, like sun-washed cereal boxes in a shop window.

  You have to wonder how he got it so right. He spent a lot of time in the house—working, reading, writing letters. He saw to his wife, who required a lot of attention in her later years. And when he did get out, you wouldn’t find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla, it must be noted, was never much for mean streets.

  He toyed periodically with the
idea of moving back to England. They certainly loved him over there. Throughout his career, his books sold as many copies in the UK as they did in the much larger American market. Chandler wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as a writer, to be perceived as the one man whose work transcended the mystery genre. It dismayed him to be reviewed by mystery critics like John Dickson Carr and Anthony Boucher. He felt he was writing Literature, and the English were more inclined to see it that way.

  It is hard to know just what to make of it when one of our own is much esteemed across the Atlantic. Our first impulse is to assume the foreigners know something we don’t, and then one is struck by the example of the French, and their inexplicable enthusiasm for Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke.

  In any event, the Brits remain crazy about him, and a few of their writers have made careers for themselves as Chandler imitators, writing books set in their idea of the USA, with characters speaking out of the sides of their mouths and saying things no American ever said. Their work, popular enough at home, is unreadable over here, where every other phrase has a palpably counterfeit ring to it.

  It’s interesting, though, that the man who added “mean streets” to the language spent virtually no time on them; that he who wrote so eloquently about getting murder out of the English country houses was most appreciated by residents of those stately homes. Chandler did write about tough guys, certainly—sneering hoods, brutal cops, hard men. But I’ve always found them his least convincing creations, with much less to them than his monied Californians, venal and jaded and world-weary, living their tarnished lives in the American equivalent of the English country house.

  Philip Marlowe is the hero and narrator of all seven of Chandler’s novels. Chandler’s body of work is not large, and one could argue that his reputation rests upon a single seven-volume novel. (He’d have produced more fiction if he hadn’t hacked away at screenplays in Hollywood, but he might have starved without the screenwriting work. And he’d arguably have written more if the bottle hadn’t gotten in the way; his best work was accomplished during stretches of sobriety.)

  Through the first five books, we aren’t given a great deal of information about Marlowe. When Robert Montgomery filmed The Lady in the Lake, he supplied Marlowe’s voice himself while letting the camera serve as the hero. This was an interesting gimmick, even if the movie can be a little hard to watch now. It strikes me, though, that Marlowe was the perfect character for this sort of treatment. He barely owns a face or a physique in the earlier books. He is an attitude, a stance, a point of view. He is, more than anything else, the lens through which Chandler shows us the world.

  In the sixth and most ambitious novel, The Long Goodbye, Chandler brings his hero in front of the camera. We’re given a little more information about his private life and a peek into his heart and soul. This book is about Marlowe, and especially about his relationships with two men—his friend, Terry Lennox, and his sort-of client, the writer Roger Wade. Early on, Marlowe goes to jail rather than admit to having driven Lennox to Mexico; later, he rescues Wade from a quack sanitarium, takes him home, and makes a pass at his wife. Throughout, he alienates powerful people with his trademark wisecracks for no apparent reason, turns down fees whenever they’re offered to him, and goes through abrupt mood swings that make you wonder if he shouldn’t be on lithium.

  Chandler was a great letter-writer, and his collected correspondence makes fascinating reading. One of his most remarkable letters was written while he was at work on The Long Goodbye. In response to a fan, Chandler wrote over 2000 words about the history and personal habits of Philip Marlowe.

  Chekhov wrote somewhere that a writer ought to know everything about his characters—diet, medical history, shoe size, etc. Chandler, in his letter to D. J. Ibberson, describes Marlowe’s apartment down to the last piece of furniture, reports on his education and birthplace, and lets us know what movies he likes to watch and what kind of booze he prefers to drink. It is hard to believe that all this was written with no greater purpose than the enlightenment of Mr. Ibberson. Chandler was almost certainly writing to himself, willing himself to see Marlowe far more vividly and completely than he had previously done.

  I’ve just reread The Long Goodbye after not having looked at it in years. I’d remembered it as flawed, but found it even more confused and confusing than I recalled. A particularly striking moment comes when Eileen Wade, whom Marlowe earlier kissed for no discernible reason, for no more reason now throws herself headlong at him. Here’s how he preserves his virtue:

  “Putting my arms around her I touched bare skin, soft skin, soft yielding flesh. I lifted her and carried her the few steps to the bed and lowered her. She kept her arms around my neck. She was making some kind of a whistling noise in her throat. Then she thrashed about and moaned. This was murder. I was as erotic as a stallion. I was losing control. You don’t get that sort of invitation from that sort of woman very often anywhere.

  “Candy saved me. There was a thin squeak and I swung around to see the doorknob moving. I jerked loose and jumped for the door. I got it open and barged through it and the Mex was tearing along the hall and down the stairs. Halfway down he stopped and turned and leered at me. Then he was gone.

  “I went back to the door and shut it—from the outside this time. Some kind of weird noises were coming from the woman on the bed, but that’s all they were now. Weird noises. The spell was broken.

  “I went down the stairs fast and crossed into the study and grabbed the bottle of Scotch and tilted it. When I couldn’t swallow any more I leaned against the wall and panted and let the stuff burn in me until the fumes reached my brain.

  “It was a long time since dinner. It was a long time since anything that was normal. The whiskey hit me hard and fast and I kept guzzling it until the room started to get hazy and the furniture was all in the wrong places and the lamplight was like wildfire or summer lightning. Then I was flat out on the leather couch, trying to balance the bottle on my chest. It seemed to be empty. It rolled away and thumped on the floor.

  “That was the last incident of which I took any precise notice.”

  It’s no trick to find passages to make fun of. One can hardly demand that a wisecrack retain its snap for forty or fifty years. Chandler sometimes seems stale, too, simply because he has been such a powerful influence on his successors. Like the schoolgirl who thought Shakespeare overrated because his plays are cliché-ridden, we can raise an eyebrow at Marlowe’s world-weary cynicism because we’ve heard it all before. And indeed we have, but Chandler wrote it first. A couple of generations of fictional private eyes have since worked their variations on his theme.

  For all that’s wrong with it—it’s too long, it doesn’t make sense, the ending’s implausible—The Long Goodbye remains my favorite. Chandler found it significant that Hammett’s favorite book, The Glass Key, is “the record of a man’s devotion to a friend.” So indeed, at least as significantly, is The Long Goodbye.

  Chandler’s career was essentially over after The Long Goodbye. Cissy was in her last illness by the time it was published, and died in late 1954. Chandler never recovered from her death. His last novel, Playback (1958), is a very weak book. When he died the following year, he left behind the opening chapters of an eighth novel, in which a very tired Marlowe has married Linda Loring (from The Long Goodbye) and become a part of the country-club set he made such a point of despising. (Robert B. Parker, a devout fan of Chandler’s, later completed the book, Poodle Springs, in what seemed to me an ill-advised if well-meant act of homage.)

  And what endures? His books, of course, still wonderfully readable after all these years. His influence, surely, stamped indelibly along with Hammett’s on the whole hardboiled school of American crime fiction.

  Even more lasting and influential, I submit, is his heroic attempt to lift his writing from a commercial genre to a level of pure literature. Eugene V. Debs, the longtime Socialist leader, once announced that he wanted to rise “with the ranks,
not from them.” Raymond Chandler wished to rise not with but from the ranks of mystery writers. He wanted to write character-driven novels, wanted to be free to include scenes and conversations and observations that did little to propel a plot. He liked comfort, but didn’t much care about wealth. What he most wanted, what he dared aspire to, was greatness.

  I’d argue that he achieved it. More important, he taught those who came after him that they too could set their sights that high. He rose from the ranks, and those ranks continue to ascend in his wake.

  Mary Higgins Clark

  * * *

  Written for Mystery Scene’s tribute issue. I can’t imagine anyone ever having trouble finding nice things to say about Mary . . .

  There’s something about Mary.

  I’m putting that in the first line on the chance that someone’s probably already pre-empted it for a title. It’s an inevitable choice, given the exposure the film got. But I think I might have led off that way film or no film, because there really is something indefinable and quite remarkable about Mary Higgins Clark.

  Crime fiction writers tend to be a surprisingly collegial lot, marked by great generosity of spirit. (Writers in the mainstream, and in exalted lit’ry circles, have all the generosity of spirit of the wolverine. I knew one writer of bestsellers, Robert Ludlum, who got a phone call from another, Robin Cook, crowing over the terms of his latest book deal. Rather than congratulate his friend, Ludlum yanked his phone out of the wall and hurled it across the room. And Stuart Brent, a Chicago bookseller told me how he’d been interviewed for a profile of John Updike, and was quoted as saying Updike was one of the finest writers of his generation. Saul Bellow called him when the piece appeared. “I thought you were my friend,” he said. “You son of a bitch, I’m never speaking to you again.”)